This past week was really nice. I should post some photos at some point.

I’ve made lots tasty food today. First was tasty french onion soup:

5 medium yellow onions, cut into slivers
olive oil
pinch of sugar
5 cups chicken broth

Cook onions over medium heat with oil in a large pot, stirring continuously for about 30-35 minutes until caramelized. Add sugar about halfway through to help caramelization. Add chicken broth and simmer for 15 minutes.

Then was carrot cake:

1.5 cups minced carrots
1 cup flour
1.5 tsp baking soda
0.5 tsp cinnamon
0.5 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
0.5 cup oil
3 tsp rum

Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a bowl. Mix oil, sugar, and eggs in another bowl. Slowly mix dry ingredients into wet mixture. Stir in carrots and rum. Bake at 325 for 50 minutes.

Frost with mixture of cream cheese and rum (om nom nom nom) with a dash of sugar. (I mixed in a bit of honey-almond cream cheese as well to make it extra tasty.)

Recipes adapted from stuff found online, and they seem to work decently well. The most annoying parts of both were the veggie preparations… for the carrot cake, since I didn’t have a grater, I ended up mincing about 5 carrots to get what I needed. The soup required constant stirring of the onions for 35 minutes lest they burn and overcook. Meh.

I wish I had some nuts or raisins to put in the cake. It would have been much tastier.

I think “Don’t Let Me Stop You” is my favorite new (but not my new favorite) Kelly Clarkson song (although “The Day We Fell Apart” and “Cry” are very close seconds, with “Sober” still remaining my all-time favorite).

Edit: OMG this cake is so good ahhh I want more but I shouldn’t have more since it’s 1:30 AM and I should sleep soon. I recommend adding a bit more carrot than above though. Also, use less rum that I did in the cream cheese frosting.

I should go get some nuts and a zucchini and make zucchini bread.

Also, if you read my journal through the actual page, I’ve gone and recategorized some entries. There are now “Photography” and “Photoshop” categories, and the “Trips” category replaces the previous location-specific categories (such as “Toronto”) and adds a couple extra trip-related entries.

Kelly‘s new album is out, and it is quite amazing. You should go buy it and support her.
My favorites: Long Shot (++), Don’t Let Me Stop You (++), All I Ever Wanted (+), If I Can’t Have You, Impossible (+), Tip of My Tongue, The Day We Fell Apart (++).
The album contains a lot of different types of songs though, so there is probably something you’ll like on it :)
(The iTunes preorder-only bonus track is also really good. What is it with her and sticking good tracks as preorder-only bonuses? “Not Today” from My December was the same… excellent track, but preorder-only. I guess it’s good that I preorder all of her albums then… <_<)

Life has been happy and full of food. We made tasty veggie soup last night, and beef stew tonight (mainly because Safeway had carrots and onions on sale for $0.99 for 5 pounds). There will be chicken drumsticks with broccoli at some point as well. Mmm food.

I mainly just wanted to plug Kelly’s new album. Wheee!

Edit: This review is all kinds of awesome.

…All I Ever Wanted, a breakup record that isn’t so much about breaking up with anyone in particular as it is about breaking up with everyone in the entire world.

This is because, in some way, we’re all her exes. …we still haven’t deleted her from our cell phones, still see her name lurking there on our IM list and sometimes, when it is very late at night and we are very drunk, we have to try very hard not to send her a text message. These things are complicated.

We had a rather intense relationship, you see. One that started out as an infatuation… grew to a burning, have-my-baby brand of obsession… then ended abruptly and quite badly. Things got weird and complicated, and we decided that this wasn’t working anymore, that we needed to be free, so we split. It was a very cruel breakup, full of canceled arena tours and fizzled singles, and none of it was really Kelly’s fault. Still, we left her standing there. We broke her heart.

So All I Ever Wanted is Clarkson’s rebound, her ill-advised trip to Cancun with her girlfriends, her fling with an underwear model (metaphorically speaking). It is designed to make us jealous, to realize we were wrong about her and to want her back with every fiber of our beings. There are probably questionable Facebook photos involved. There are definitely margaritas.

Win.

Today was an awesome day full of surprises and happy.

First surprise was finding out I got a promotion at work. I’m glad people are happy with the work that I’m doing.

Second surprise was coming home to a box from Keith containing these awesome and amazing cups:

Third surprise was trying to make cakepie and having it turn out actually really tasty. It’s double-strawberry with strawberry glaze instead of chocolate cherry because the cherry topping was $expensive and Em didn’t have any chocolate cake mix. But om nom nom nom anyway.

There was also Notre Dame with Tim and Keith.

Whee!

At some point I should try making piecake (which would be the inverse of this… a pie baked inside a cake) but for some reason it doesn’t sound as tasty.

Fresh Express so thoughtfully included some extra protein in my lunch salad today. What a nice feature…

>_<

I dunno, I was impressed that its wings were all present and fully intact, especially given how much I had mixed the salad up (and, unfortunately, eaten).